ATI believes that the use of Armory or Armoryd, licensed under the AGPL 3, as a backend application that interacts with any information from the Internet, causes all software in between Armoryd and the Internet to also be AGPL 3 licensed. Therefore, the source code is required to be publicly available.
This seems like a rather surprising position to take. It would, for instance, prohibit using an off-the-shelf commercial firewall between Armory and the Internet.
Agreed.
It's rather ironic that ATI couldn't, as things currently stand, host an armoryd-based service off of their
own website at
https://bitcoinarmory.com/.
https://bitcoinarmory.com/ is (currently) hosted with the help of
CloudFlare's anti-DDOS service. Although CloudFlare (as a for-profit company) has chosen to open-source
some of their software (good for them!), their platform is not completely open source.
Although I don't have a problem in general with
"copyleft" licenses (and have used them myself), I find (just IHMO) the AGPL license to be far too restrictive for my taste (edited to add: especially ATI's interpretation of the AGPL license)....
Having said all that, if that's how the Armory devs would like to see their code used, I can/will respect those wishes.